Pats Enjoying Their Anonymity

New England Has Managed To Put Together A 13-game Win Streak With Little Fanfare.

January 17, 2004|By Chris Harry, Sentinel Staff Writer

BOSTON -- The New England Patriots are two victories from winning a second world championship in three years.

But who are they?

OK, everybody knows about cover-boy quarterback Tom Brady, but who are his teammates chasing football immortality with him?

Would you recognize the two Pro Bowlers off the Pats' stubborn defense -- tackle Richard Seymour or cornerback Ty Law -- if they strolled through the Mall at Millenia? Would you even want starting tailback Antowain Smith, he of a team-high 642 rushing yards, to sign an autograph? And how quickly would you reach for the clicker if a Marriott commercial featuring boring Coach Bill Belichick popped on the tube?

Yet, to suggest the Patriots are secure in their anonymity would be like saying Bostonians are confident in their clam chowder. We'll keep on wondering who the Pats are, they'll keep padding a winning streak that just might put them among the elite teams in NFL history.

"Yeah, their defense moves around and they do stuff," Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning said during Friday's AFC Championship Game news conference. "But more than all that, they're good players."

And unless Manning and the rest of the Colts (14-4) can stop them in Sunday's conference title game at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, the Patriots (15-2) will become the first team since the unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins to win 14 in a row in a season. They'll also clinch a berth in Super Bowl XXXVIII at Houston on Feb. 1.

"We're a week-to-week team," Belichick said. "We don't really worry too much about what happened in the past, whether it be one week, two weeks, three weeks or 20 weeks ago. We are more concerned about what the upcoming challenges are and how we are going to meet them."

With remarkably little fanfare outside of this region, the Patriots have put together a 13-game winning streak. They were just the third team ever -- joining the '72 Dolphins and '34 Chicago Bears -- to win 12 in a row to end a regular season, but not too many people have been overly impressed. New England's players included. A bunch of them, don't forget, were on the Superdome floor two Februarys ago when Adam Vinatieri pounded a 48-yard field goal through the uprights as time expired to defeat the high-powered and heavily favored St. Louis Rams for the franchise's first championship.

A winning streak -- even the league's longest in 31 years -- can't really compare to a confetti party and Lombardi Trophy. In that scenario, who cares if Joe Fan doesn't know who you are?

"We just don't focus on things that we can't control. Beating the Indianapolis Colts this weekend is all we can control and if you are focusing on anything else, you just don't fit in our locker room very well," Brady said. "That type of attitude, it just kind of gets scrapped by everybody because we have a lot of veteran leaders, guys who have played in very significant games and guys who have Super Bowl rings."

Added middle linebacker Tedy Bruschi: "We don't look at it like it like we've won 13 in row. We look at it more like we've won one in a row 13 times."

If the streak does get to 15, a lot of people will be wondering how the Patriots could have slipped all those victories by a football-watching nation.

Here's how:

New England finished the season with the 17th-ranked offense and seventh-ranked defense, hardly the numbers expected from a team with such a dominating record.

Though Brady, the most valuable player of Super Bowl XXXVI, is considered the superstar on the team, he finished 2003 as just the 10th-ranked passer in the NFL with a rating of 85.9.

Neither Smith nor third-down back Kevin Faulk averaged more than 3.6 yards per carry for the league's 27th-ranked run offense.

The team's leading receiver, Deion Branch, caught just 57 passes. There were 31 players in the NFL who caught more.

Defensively, the Patriots were a middle-of-the-pack team against the pass and their best pass-rusher was outside linebacker Mike Vrabel, who finished with 91/2 sacks.

And now for the equalizers.

Obviously, Brady is doing something right. He's 35-12 as a starter for his career. A defense that was supposed to be in disarray following the release of veteran safety and five-time Pro Bowler Lawyer Milloy six days before the regular-season opener righted itself after the first month of the season. The Patriots allowed a league-low 14.9 points and amassed 40 take-aways during the regular season.

The team went 9-0 at home, shut out three opponents in Foxboro, and all told surrendered only 36 points their last seven home games -- that's 5.14 per game -- with 14 coming in last week's beating of the Tennessee Titans in the divisional round.

Who are these guys?

Manning, the NFL's co-MVP, knows them.

"Bruschi and Vrabel make a ton of plays, and Seymour is the man," Manning said. "I thought losing Milloy was going to be a big blow to their team, but they replaced him with [former Pro-Bowler] Rodney Harrison."